Over the last twenty years the dramatic growth of fluorescence mycroscopy techniques and advances in microscopic manipulation of single molecules as DNA has been accompanied by the migration of a huge number of scientists, coming from the most different disciplines, toward the new "Eldorado" of the modern biological research. The work presented in this book reflects these recent developments in applying typical physics tools to the study of the bacterium Escherichia coli. This amazing 2.5 micrometer cell is for biological physicists equivalent to the hydrogen atom for atomic physicists. The...